There’s a Target opening in my neighborhood that’s close enough to be my default stop for anything but specialty grocery. If this rolls out along in time to be there day one, I will almost never have to carry my wallet again.

Other than the occasional quick stop for bread, my Target runs lately have made use of in-store pick-up and Apple Pay through their app. Easily one of the best retail ones out there.

Damn, what a loss. I remember watching the very first episode of SpongeBob. At the time, I wasn’t a fan.

Over the next few years, it became one of the shows that my brother and I would watch his kids. Even got my dad interested – something that had happened since “Rocko’s Modern Life,” “Ren & Stimpy,” or “Aaaah, Real Monsters” had been on.

To say that the show paved the way for so many animators, storytellers, and—frankly—meme connoisseurs is an understatement in the least.

I’m a happy HomePod user, but this holiday ad for Google’s Home Hub is interesting on a couple levels. It’s entertaining, but it also gives me that built-this-eighteen-months-early pang.

Spent some time working on a recipe skill for Alexa that would walk you through a series of client-created recipes step-by-step. Now it’s a flagship feature in a Google ad (jump to about the 0:17 mark).

A couple weeks back, wrote a pretty lengthy overview of Apple’s fall software and hardware to show the teams at work some of the opportunities for brands, users and developers. An excerpt’s now live at Golin’s website.

A couple of Universal super fans set out to break the record for most rides on Jurassic Park — The Ride at Universal Studios Hollywood. Needless to say after the record-breaking 61st ride, life...uh...found a way.

Facebook’s recent Cambridge Analytica scandal is the type of news story that tends to highlight the problem of a 24-hour news cycle. Political intrigue, privacy and security scares and an executive team failing every crisis PR test?

It’s a brand crisis Hydra. One that might, finally, trigger a digital privacy clampdown in the US.

I think that this certain situation is so dire and has become so large that probably some well-crafted regulation is necessary. The ability of anyone to know what you’ve been browsing about for years, who your contacts are, who their contacts are, things you like and dislike and every intimate detail of your life -- from my own point of view it shouldn’t exist.

Our time is all going to be up at some point and when you’re (hopefully) looking back on it, the people and experiences you have in your life will be what you cherish or regret. I know because I saw it firsthand and getting that privilege at 22 meant I could live those years of boundless energy and optimism with some of the wisdom of someone much older.

You’ve got one life remaining, don’t squander it.

Great piece. I'd be lying if I said I didn't need to remind myself of this more.

Recently updated the McRib Finder concept for our McDonald's client to feature the Shamrock Shake. This new version's quite special—new stickers, plus for the first time a web backend. Even recreated a little bit of an Instagram-story style camera to make the sticker experience even more fun.

Hands-down, the camera is probably the thing that matters most to you about your smartphone. You may not always think about it, but chances are it’s the device feature that you use the most, even if only tangentially.

Whether you’re using it for video chats, snapping a pic, or playing around with the latest AR experience, getting the most out of your camera starts with some simple tricks.

A Facebook page as the default web presence for a physical business is user-hostile. It's at Facebook's whim that pages get tossed behind a login window, and then what of those who don't want to use Facebook? Or have reason not to use Facebook?

John Gruber, absolutely killing it on share buttons, particularly on Medium:

A website should not fight the browser. Let the browser provide the chrome, and simply provide the content. Web developers know this is right — these dickbars are being rammed down their throats by SEO experts. The SEO folks are the same dopes who came up with the genius strategy of requiring 5-10 megabytes of privacy-intrusive CPU-intensive JavaScript on every page load that slows down websites. Now they come to their teams and say, “Our pages are too slow — we gotta move to AMP so our pages load fast.”

I love Medium. I don't mean to be overly harsh on Medium, but he's right.

Share buttons — dickbars, in Gruber's parlance — are not only unnecessary, but they're starting to border on user-hostile. They're absolutely one of the worst things about the modern web experience, made a thousand times worse when they're also presented in a modal when the page first loads.

Gotta wonder about the actual savvy of all the marketing/design groups telling clients to do this. If your goal is to boost engagement this way, you're spending too much time on things that aren't the content.